Following is the text of President Cedric W. Dempsey's State of the Association address at the 2000 NCAA Convention.

In these State of the Association addresses over the past few years, I've tried to remind all of us of our history and the principles upon which this organization was founded and by which it has prospered for nearly 100 years. I believe those principles are alive and well today, but I also believe they will be constantly tested as we confront new pressures, new distractions and new opportunities, moving into our next century.

We would be hard-pressed to find a year in the history of the Association with more distractions and opportunities than the one we have just completed. There have been many significant moments in the past, certainly. But 1999 has been a watershed year.

We started the year with the controversy over specifications for baseball bats, then received and appealed a decision in the Cureton case, settled the restricted-earnings case, moved the national office 500 miles to Indianapolis and replaced two-thirds of our staff, brought closure to the bat specifications, and negotiated a media and marketing rights package with CBS for a minimum of $6 billion over 11 years. And just days before Christmas, we received word that we were successful with our appeal in the Cureton case. That -- by any standard -- is a full agenda for any Association.

I'll touch more on some of those events in a moment. But there was another significant event in 1999 that drew very little attention. In October, the NCAA Executive Committee set four broad goals that define this Association's charge through the remainder of its first 100 years and prepare us for our second century.

Simply put, the four goals are to:

Promote student-athletes and college sports through public awareness.

Protect student-athletes through standards of fairness and integrity.

Prepare student-athletes for lifetime leadership, and

Provide student-athletes and college sports with the funding to help meet these goals.

Promote, protect, prepare, provide. They will drive our mission for what I believe in and have a personal commitment to -- nothing less than the total development of the student-athlete.

The first goal calls for the Association to inform constituents on campus, in the media and in the general public about the lifelong values of athletics in the educational environment.

How are we going to do that? This month, we will begin implementation of a coordinated public affairs plan that focuses on the positive contributions of student-athletes and college sports in higher education. We will do that by establishing an integrated NCAA communications network to involve campus and conference leaders at the local level to tell the NCAA story and the story of college sports.

We'll build stronger relationships with coaches and administrators -- those most influential in shaping the attitudes and lives of student-athletes. And we will begin a campaign to go directly to the public with important messages about the NCAA, college sports and higher education.

That is a quick overview of the plan, the details of which you will hear more about in the near future. It sounds simple, but I assure you the plan will test our ability to interrelate the national office with the campuses and the conferences. It will test us to stay on task, and to change where our practices don't fulfill our mission. We need your full support to achieve this goal.

The Executive Committee's second goal calls on the NCAA to reinforce the values of fairness and integrity in intercollegiate athletics. While our role as an Association is to implement the rules by which members agree to abide, our goal is that institutions and individuals will assume greater responsibility for their own actions.

Let me give you an example: In the last five years, the number of self-reported cases of secondary violations has increased, by nearly 81 percent, to slightly more than 1,600 in 1998 alone. This supports my contention that, as a group, we are doing a better job of monitoring our programs and taking responsibility for compliance.

Another key point on the integrity agenda has been sports wagering. Through an aggressive education effort and as a result of a few high profile point-shaving cases, we've increased the awareness of this critical concern. But because sports wagering is legal in some places, we continue to battle a society-wide perception that betting on college sports is OK. It is definitely not OK.

I want to introduce a new initiative to address this problem. The Executive Committee -- and we will ask each of you to become involved as well -- fully supports proposed federal legislation that will ban all wagering on college sports. This will include those opportunities that today are legal. This will be an uphill battle. The opposition is well-financed and determined. But this is the right position for us to take. As a nation, we simply cannot sanction betting on college students.

It's generally accepted that in recent years sportsmanship and ethical behavior have suffered serious deterioration. We cannot give those values away to the bad attitude and offensive behavior we often see in society. Athletics must lead. We must develop and implement strategies that foster greater acceptance of the values of respect, fairness, civility, honesty, caring and responsibility among student-athletes, coaches, officials, fans and related groups.

The third goal is one by which this Association and intercollegiate athletics will be most critically judged. The Executive Committee has mandated that the NCAA prepare student-athletes for lifetime leadership in a dynamic and diverse society.

When we say in our mission that we must maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of higher education, we are talking about academic standards. It's fundamental for higher education to maintain the connection between classroom performance and athletics participation, and we must increase graduation rates for student-athletes.

Those rates -- especially in football and basketball -- are not high enough. We must do a better job of fulfilling our academic responsibility.

In this new year, I'll recommend that we continue to look at ways to strengthen the continuing-eligibility requirements to better ensure academic success of student-athletes. But frankly, institutions must then discipline themselves to recruit for more than just the freshman year -- and to only admit students who are committed and can stay the course.

As one high-profile football coach recently noted, "If a prospect doesn't fit the standard deviation of your student body, it's going to be very difficult for that athlete to successfully perform schoolwork." He went on to say, "You can't sign players who only have a 20, 30 or 40 percent chance of graduating from your university."

I also recommend that we create other incentives for institutions to identify and recruit only those student-athletes with significant likelihood of success. In Division I, the Basketball Issues Working Group has developed a proposal that will reward programs that are successful in graduating basketball players with additional grants-in-aid. I fully support that concept.

The second component in this goal deals with deregulation. For all of us, change is often difficult to embrace. Nowhere has that been more apparent than with deregulation of the NCAA Manual. Despite an almost universally accepted complaint that there are too many rules, and numerous attempts at various times to reduce the volume, we haven't made much progress. Inevitably, we lose sight of the deregulation target in favor of concerns about the level playing field, budgets and other provincial interests.

Well, we have a new opportunity to deregulate and help student-athletes through a
discussion emerginºg in all three divisions regarding amateurism. Based on nearly 300 reinstatement requests from you in the last two years, it is clear that we are not yet of one mind on how to apply a consistent standard. I believe it is time to redefine many of those rules. We can accomplish this without sacrificing our principle of amateurism.

The application of our current rules has resulted in inconsistent consequences for various amateurism violations. Here is the undeniable truth: Some high-school prospects have lost all or a significant amount of their collegiate eligibility for violations where no competitive advantage was gained, while other prospects who participated in extensive organized competition and gained significant competitive advantages were able to enjoy four seasons of collegiate competition. That shouldn't happen.

We have the first set of proposals -- involving the pre-enrolled prospect -- before you in Division I. Tomorrow, you will have a chance to discuss those in the Division I forum. I encourage you to enter this discussion with an open mind, and I strongly encourage the Division I Management Council to forward these proposals to the membership in April.

The third component of our commitment to student-athletes as leaders is our responsibility to deepen their appreciation for the advantages of a diverse society and to provide opportunities for responsible citizenship.

To that end, we should consider requiring attendance of student-athletes, coaches and administrators at diversity education programs as part of Division I certification and for self-study programs in Divisions II and III.

We also must increase our attention to hiring for diversity. When we moved the national headquarters to Indianapolis, we dramatically changed our diversity makeup. That was my personal goal. Today, female representation on our administrative staff is 47 percent and minority representation is nearly 22 percent.

I'm proud of that model for the national office, but the track record for building equally diverse staff at member institutions -- especially at the level of head coach and athletics management -- simply is not good enough.

There is a price to be paid if we don't change the status quo. We continue to hire white men almost exclusively in top coaching and administrative positions. That makeup does not reflect the ethnic and gender makeup of our student-athlete population or society in general.

The consequences of continuing down the current path could likely be expensive in many ways. Your commitment to reflecting societal diversity in your hiring practices is the only thing that will make a difference. It must be real, it must be personal, and it must be deep.

The fourth component is to fulfill our purpose of making student-athletes an integral part of the student body and developing them into leaders. We have to remove those regulations that impede the student-athletes' integration into campus life.

We must review the playing and practice season legislation to decrease the athletics time burden on student-athletes and increase the time and support to help them reach their academic goals. We have a 20-hour rule that should ensure balance. But in developing the public affairs plan, we asked a focus group of recently graduated student-athletes about the 20-hour rule. Their reaction was that it's a joke. That troubles me.

We've compromised student-athletes' time away from their sport with so-called "volunteer" athletics participation. There are even some in college athletics that would eliminate the 20-hour rule all together. We cannot allow that to happen. In fact, we have to review the exceptions to the rule and get the balance back to where it should be.

Now, let's get to the mission-critical issue of modeling good leadership behavior.

We need to address this issue on two fronts. Our primary concern is how we as leaders model behavior for those who participate in college sports. To that end, I want the Association -- in conjunction with conferences and campuses -- to develop leadership workshops for coaches and administrators.

Second, we need to increase access for more student-athletes to the NCAA Foundation Leadership Conference so that we have more participants taking the lessons learned back to their campuses.

The Executive Committee's fourth goal addresses the need for sound fiscal management of the Association's resources. In terms of mission, this goal is more important than ever as the cost continues to rise for providing quality athletics, academic and citizenship opportunities -- in other words, the total development of the student-athlete.

In Divisions I and II, we are spending $829 million annually on athletic-related financial aid alone. And as a group, the 973 colleges and universities that are members of the Association are spending $3.4 billion each year on college sports. That is a difficult burden for schools to carry. It is no wonder then, that fewer than 80 schools in the entire membership are operating their athletics programs in the black.

Among our negotiating goals in the new rights agreement with CBS was to increase revenue distributions to member institutions for the direct support of participation opportunities. The Executive Committee will begin considering a process for allocating the dollars from this new agreement at this Convention. Our timeline anticipates a decision by October of this year, which should provide plenty of time -- and opportunities -- for input and discussion by the membership. I'll be recommending substantial increases in distribution to our members and in student-athlete assistance programs.

Our initial fiscal challenge -- and it will be taken up by the Executive Committee this week -- will be to determine how the $40 million in up-front money that we have already received will be distributed.

The budget subcommittee will recommend a plan to the Executive Committee on Tuesday for distribution of that up-front payment -- a recommendation that I fully support. Thirty million would be distributed to Division I schools based on our current formula, $3 million based on legislative requirements would go to Divisions II and III as a one-time payment, and the remaining $7 million would go toward rebuilding the Association's reserves.

I'll also recommend that the distribution to our Division I members increase at a minimum of 23 percent in 2003 -- the first year of the new agreement -- with annual increases of no less than 8.5 percent. Divisions II and III also will see an increase of 20 percent in the first year followed by approximately 8 percent each year thereafter.

Another of our negotiating goals was to increase the dollars earmarked specifically for student-athletes. I said at the time of the announcement and I want to reiterate today -- student-athletes must be among the first beneficiaries of this new rights agreement.

I believe the student-athlete assistance fund and the academic enhancement fund provide the two best avenues to enhance student-athlete needs. The student-athlete assistance fund is designed to give money directly to student-athletes for clothing, educational expenses and other special needs. Under the current distribution formula, these two funds will distribute more than $250 million, over a 10-year period, directly to student-athletes. That is a significant amount.

But, I'll recommend that the special assistance fund be increased from $10 million annually to $25 million in the first year of the new agreement, with inflationary increases of at least 8 percent over the life of the contract.

Increases in this effort coupled with the academic enhancement program already funded at $15 million annually will provide more than three-quarters of a billion dollars over the life of the agreement to the direct support of student-athletes.

And I will also propose greater access to these funds and greater flexibility in how they can be spent so more student-athletes can benefit in more ways. This means that while our revenue stream from rights fees is more than doubling, our direct-dollar commitment to student-athletes is tripling under the new agreement.

Over the term of the new contract, these recommendations -- along with increases for NCAA championships -- will return a minimum of $5.2 billion to member schools, student-athletes and championships. At the same time, they will decrease the percentage of support to the administrative functions of the association -- a specific goal of the Executive Committee.

But as significant as the $6 billion agreement is, it will not solve all the financial concerns of athletics programs. And we must continue to fully explore opportunities to diversify revenue sources of the Association.

Well, as you can see, we have an ambitious agenda. But this is the right moment -- indeed a unique moment -- and we have the financial stability to seize this opportunity. The only question may be our commitment.

So in closing, I hope you will ask yourself this question frequently in this new year, this new century, this new millennium:

If we aren't here to take advantage of this moment - this new beginning - to rededicate ourselves to our mission; if we aren't here to model and fulfill the values of education, athletics, diversity, respect and citizenship; if we aren't here to recommit ourselves to building leaders on the team, in the classroom, in the community, and in society -- the total development of the student-athlete; and if we aren't here for those things, then, for goodness sakes, what are we here for?

I believe that is why we are here. I also believe in each of you, and I look forward to working with you on this ambitious plan as we enter a second century of commitment to our members, all those who follow college sports and -- most importantly -- our student-athletes. Thank you.